Where It Excels

Flixster is an extremely comprehensive app. You get listings based on your location plus a ton of other stuff. You can easily watch trailers for any movie. You can also check out when a movie is coming to DVD and save it to your Netflix queue. When you've chosen a movie and you're heading to the theater you can find nearby restaurants so you can grab something to eat before or after the show. Flixster can do a lot and it's fast.

Where It Falls Short

You can't buy tickets directly from the Flixster app. You also can't filter movies that are playing in your area soon. So if, for example, you know you want to see a movie in the next 30 minutes but you're not sure when it's playing, you have to just check each movie or each theater rather than just seeing which movies are playing near you within that time frame. Not much to complain about other than that.

The Competition

Before we get into the very small amount of competition on the iPhone, I want to mention where there is a very small amount of competition. Basically, services that provide movie listings used to make those listings affordable to developers but then they came out with their own apps. Now the licensing fees have gone up and few independent developers can afford to pay them. There's just not really a good business model for movie listing apps. There used to be a great app called Movies Now—which would likely be the top choice in this post if it still existed—but it doesn't because it couldn't afford to continue operating. This is why you don't see a lot of great options. There's nothing wrong with Flixster. It's a great app. It's just too bad there isn't much in the way of competition.

IMDb (Free) is the official Internet Movie Database app. Although its primary focus isn't showtimes, it does have a showtimes feature that is quite good. If you already have the IMDb app on your iPhone, it may be sufficient for movie listings and you won't need/want to download something else to do the job.

Showtimes (Free) is a decent app for movie showtimes, and it's been around since the early days of the iPhone, but it's not really at the level of Flixster or IMDb.

Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.